My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding - Edited by P. N. Elrod. So much fun! I wish it was a little bit less het, although Charlaine Harris's (wonderful!) story has a sharp metaphor about "illegal" marriages. I enjoyed every story (even despite the poor writing quality in one or two), except perhaps Esther Friesner's "The Wedding of Wylda Serene," which was just too self-consciously clever. And also, I love Rachel Caine's Weather Wardens series, but her story here, "Dead Man's Chest," seemed to require a bit too much suspension of disbelief, even for a fantasy story. I appreciated a lot that several of the stories had main characters who weren't white. Susan Krinard's "'...Or Forever Hold Your Peace'" was excellent--I was sad to investigate her & discover that there's only one other Kit & Olivia story.
Both Sides of Time - Caroline B. Cooney. This is a mostly fluffy, slightly annoying novel about a teenage girl obsessed w/"romance," which she doesn't get from her car-obsessed boyfriend. Somehow she's whisked away to a century ago, where she almost instantly falls in love w/a railroad tycoon's son. There's also a murder, anti-Irish bias, & a crazed & controlling father, among other soap opera-like elements. The two things that struck me the most: arrrgh, the love plot! It's one of my biggest pet peeves w/YA novels (books in general, but I think YA does it more): people who supposedly fall in love, but we've hardly seen anything to persuade us that it's not just hormones or a crush. The second thing: there's a lot of thought on the part of Annie (our protagonist) about the ways in which women of the 19th century are constricted & constrained, but then she also comes to realize that women of her own century are still very limited in their own choices. It lent a nice counterbalancing weight to the fluff of the love story. Not sure I'll read the sequel, though.
GraceLand - Chris Abani. Elvis Oke is a teenager growing up in a slum in Lagos, Nigeria. His mother's dead, his father's a drunk, & his casual work (as an Elvis impersonator, no less) dancing for tourists isn't working out. The novel follows Elvis through a turbulent, postcolonial landscape, where no one is good or evil unmixed. Elvis himself is clearly a sympathetic character; among other bits of evidence, we see him buying food for homeless men scorned by everyone else. But, in a flashback, we also see him silently witnessing his cousin being raped by her father. The country is contorted with violence, poverty, & corruption. However, as one of Elvis's friends says, chiding him (for being appalled at his friend--a grown man--for sleeping with a 12-year-old girl), "We are who we are because we are who we were made. No forget." I was reminded of some of the Filipino/American literature I've read, which has similar themes (& also sometimes similar American pop/culture names for people, of course). This was a moving read.
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